research is like meditation; a cure for mental illness; answer to mysterious questions
When it comes to solving complex scientific problems, there is often a big gap of unexplored ideas in the range of "too risky to be funded by the government" and "too unexplored to start a company". For example, it is basically impossible to incentivize companies to work on classes of drugs that went off-patent; likewise, it is really hard to fund properly-powered clinical trials in academia.
The most profound leaps often emerge from such “frivolous” curiosity: feynman’s obsession with wobbly plates that led to breakthroughs in quantum electrodynamics or kepler’s fixation on the precise nesting of planetary orbits in polyhedra, which ultimately unraveled the laws of motion. we dream of a world that encourages this kind of pure exploration—a world where entire afternoons might be spent studying molecular dynamics or thinking up new computational paradigms, not because it will yield a new app or business model, but because the act of understanding is, in itself, transcendent. - https://homebrew.nyc/manifesto
Oh man, tons. Here are just a few things.
● Screw around on projects that might be a total waste of time, just for fun.
● Write a paper that’s like “Hey here’s a weird thing I found and I have no idea why it happens”
● Research stuff that’s bizarre or unpopular or disconnected from any existing literature.
● Write a paper that’s like “Hey my hypothesis was totally wrong, what’s up with that”
● Work on super long-term projects that only bear fruit after decades of work
Creating diverse ecosystems is hard for humans because they like to do whatever everyone else is doing, even when they know it’s wrong. So when you’re trying to be a mammal and you see someone else trying to be a lizard, you might think they’re just doing a bad job being a mammal. “You should try having little hairs all over your body,” you might tell them. But a lizard isn’t a bad mammal. It’s a lizard. Its job is to eat flies and bask on rocks.
Be the lizard. The mammals—that is, mainstream scientists, the ones who get PhDs and professor jobs—have their niche covered. What we need is more people doing botany in their backyards. We need basement chemists. We need amateur geologists and meteorologists. Heck, if some mammals want to try a different niche, so much the better: ditch the projects you think are pointless, do the thing you think is most important, write it in your own words, and put it on the internet. There’s plenty of space for everyone. - https://ajr.fyi/files/fractal-canon.pdf
"Do what you are really excited about. Everything will follow." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hpn4SAX0dI
“Most days you think ‘I am a worm’. This is the natural state of the researcher.”